Ateliers

In order for the Parliament to give its own input and hear more expert on the budgetary aspects of the European Commission package for completing Europe's Economic and Monetary Union, a workshop on this issue will take place on Wednesday, 21 March 2018, 14:30 pm - 17:00 pm, European Parliament, Paul-Henry Spaak Building (PHS) room 3C050, Brussels. A debate will follow all presentations.

Rapporteur from BUDG committee: Reimer Böge

Rapporteur from ECON committee: Pervenche Berès

With regards of the agencies' resources, the workshop may look into the principles of fee setting, and 5% cut and the redeployment pool vs. the need to provide timely services to industry, which is paying for them.

From the point of oversight, items for discussion may include the question of discharge procedure for fully self-financed agencies, provisions for prevention of conflict of interest in case of the fee collecting agencies, ECA financial audit outsourcing provisions, and the question of carryovers.

Points of interest for both BUDG and CONT remain the questions of performance, efficiency and effectiveness, such as indicators for measuring outputs and ways to compare them across the agencies, developing synergies and shared services, and possible grouping or clustering of the agencies.

In order to shed some light on the practical consequences of this revision proposed by the Commission and to provide Members with arguments on how to improve it, a workshop will take place at the BUDG meeting of 21 March, from 15.00 to 17.30 in József Antall Building (JAN), room 4Q1

The European Court of Auditors will first express its opinions on the proposed new financial rules applicable to the general budget of the Union. Then a set of specific issues on the Commission proposal to reform the Financial Regulation will be addressed, e.g. performance based budgeting, externalisation of tasks, conflict of interest, and citizen's involvement. A debate will be held at the end of all the presentations.

In order to respect in full the spirit and content of the EFSI Regulation, these implementation failures should be addressed. In July 2015, after intensive negotiations between European Commission, Council and Parliament, the EFSI Regulation entered into force. In these negotiations, the European Parliament insisted on a series of political and technical adjustments and managed to significantly improve the European Commission proposal. The European Parliament insisted on additionally of EFSI, achieved an additional one billion financing from unallocated margins, a powerful intermediary structure (National Promotional Banks), and support for small and medium enterprises.
In September 2016, the European Commission presented an amending Regulation to the original EFSI Regulation of 2015 (EFSI 1.0), prolonging the instrument, as well as proposing changes on the content with an aim to augment its capacity and to address certain insufficiencies.

In response, several budgetary mechanisms were created or their use enhanced, as a result of attempts to increase the available funding through the use of revolving funds, attracting additional private funds and contributions from the EU member states. However, a consequence of these measures was also an increase in the level of complexity of the EU budgetary architecture, making the EU budget less transparent to the EU citizens and posing challenges for the European Parliament as one of the two arms of the budgetary authority.

The European Commission will present its first evaluation of its last public consultation and an outlook on its proposal, the Court of Auditors will express its request for the next reform of the financial regulation. Then, different stakeholders involved in direct management will give their views. A debate will follow all presentations.

 

Rapporteur from BUDG Committee: Inge Gräßle